Description

Read. Write. Oxford.

Technology: A Reader for Writers focuses on the timely and vital subject of information and communications technologies and presents a range of contemporary and classic articles that invite students to consider and engage with questions related to how, why, and in what ways we may be able to critically reflect on ourselves and societies by writing and thinking about technology. Accompanied by group-discussion questions and writing prompts that ask students to engage with many of the same information and communications technologies they are reading about, the readings in Technology: A Reader for Writers give students the opportunity to explore, learn, and write about technologies and the many issues and institutions related to them,
including education, public policy, healthcare, social ethics, literacy practices, social activism, and global economics, in a unique, purpose-based, and hands-on manner.

Developed for the freshman composition course, Technology: A Reader for Writers includes an interdisciplinary mix of public, academic, and scientific reading selections, providing students with the rhetorical knowledge and compositional skills required to participate effectively in discussions about technology, science, and society.

Technology: A Reader for Writers is part of a series of brief single-topic readers from Oxford University Press designed for today's college writing courses. Each reader in this series approaches a topic of contemporary conversation from multiple perspectives.

About the Author(s)

About the Author

Johannah Rodgers is Assistant Professor in English and Rhetoric at The City University of New York.

Table of Contents

1. Which Came First, Technology or Society? Thomas P. Hughes, "Defining Technology." Human-Built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture 2004Eric Schatzberg, "What Is Technology?" Rethinking Technology Blog 2012Sarah Murray, "Transition: Technology Puts Power In The Hands of Many." Financial Times 2013Leo Marx, "Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept." Technology and Culture 2010Kevin Kelly, "What Technology Wants." The Technium Blog 2009Neil Postman, "Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change." Lecture 19982. Imagining Worlds: Does Science Fiction Inform Our Technological Reality? Robert J. Sawyer, "The Purpose of Science Fiction." Slate.com 2011Neal Stephenson, "Innovation Starvation."
World Policy Journal 2011Jon Turney, "Imagining Technology." NESTA 2013Kathryn Cramer, "On Science and Science Fiction." Hieroglyph.com 1995Damien Broderick, "Stranger Than You Can Imagine." Cosmos.com 2005Wendy Lesser, "Unearthly Powers." Threepenny Review 2010Michio Kaku, "Physics of the Impossible." Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel 20093. (Dis)Connecting in a Digital Age: What Does It Mean to Be Human in an Age of Social Media and "Intelligent" Machines? Sherry Turkle, "Alone Together." Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other 2010Susan Maushart, "When My Kids Unplugged." Salon.com 2011Scott McCloud, "Media
and Communication." Understanding Comics 1998Evgeny Morozov, "Machines of Laughter and Forgetting." The New York Times 2013Gary Marcus, "Moral Machines." The New Yorker Blog 2012Rose Eveleth, "Robots: Is the Uncanny Valley Real?" BBC 20134. Digital Literacies and Identities: How Is Technology Changing Readers and Writers? Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The Atlantic 2008Clay Shirky, "Does the Internet Make You Smarter?" The Wall Street Journal 2010Sam Leith, "What Does It All Meme?" Financial Times 2011Toby Litt, "The Reader and Technology." Granta 2012William Cronon, "Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World." Historians.org 2012Ursula K. LeGuin, "The Death of the Book." Blog Post 20125. Digital Education:What Can Technology Teach Us? Diane Ravitch, "Promise and Peril." Scientific American 2013S. Craig Watkins, "Mobile Phones, Digital Media, and America's Learning Divide." DML Central 2011Andrew Delbanco, "MOOCs of Hazard" The New Republic 2013SJSU Philosophy Department, "An Open Letter to Professor Michael Sandel [Regarding His JusticeX MOOC] from the Philosophy Department at the San Jose State University." The Chronicle of Higher Education 2013David Williamson Shaffer, Kurt Squire, Richard Halverson, And James P. Gee, "Video Games and the Future of Learning." Phi Delta Kappan 20056. Digital (In)Equality and Politics: Is Technology Changing the World? Kentaro Toyama, "Can Technology End Poverty?" Boston Review 2010Susan Davis, "Can Technology
End Poverty?" Harvard Business School Blog 2013Jaron Lanier, "The Problem in Brief." Who Owns the Future? 2013John Naughton, "Digital Capitalism Produces Few Winners." The Guardian 2013Malcolm Gladwell, "Why the Revolution Will Not Be Retweeted." The New Yorker 2012Douglas Schuler, "It's Time to Work for a Better Internet." Internet Evolution 20107. Can Humans Live Forever? Healthcare, the Environment, and Technology Francis Fukuyama, "Our Posthuman Future." book excerpt 2003Daniel Callahan and Sherwin B. Nuland. "The Quagmire: How American Medicine is Destroying Itself." The New Republic 2011Eric Topol, "How Technology is Transforming Healthcare." The Creative Destruction of Medicine 2013Atul Gawande, "Slow Ideas." The New Yorker
2013Francisco Seijo, "When Worlds Collide." The Breakthrough.org 2012Appendix: Researching and Writing About Technology